thoughts on agility and agile leadership

Month: June 2016

“Process for process sake is not good for goodness sake.” — Lynn A. Edmark

I hope before everyone that knows me thinks I have had a stroke, joined a cult or lost my mind; I trust you understand my title is meant to be fully sarcastic. But, unfortunately as a organization, it is a natural reaction to an underlying problem.

It typically goes something like this …

“Bob, people in X group and not doing Y thing we need so it’s causing us not to get ‘the big thing’ done”.

“Well, Carol we have to get this done. Failure is not an option! As a leader of this organization, I will mandate a process that will ensure the deliverables are being met so that we can stay on track. (inferring heads will roll if not)”

Leader walks away and crafts his corporate edict that is going to “fix the problem” by ensuring people comply to a certain way to work and “follow the process”.

Anyone else see the glowing problems here?

It’s reactionary. Instead of understanding the underlying problem of the delays within the interdependent work, they are treating a subset without understanding the problem as a whole.

The personal acceptance by leadership that “compliance means acceptance”. What are they potential side effects to their overall organizational culture in doing this? Did they just create an air of favoritism by siding with Carol’s concerns through their immediate reaction? Did they just create a situation in which, without sufficient understanding of the problem, they alienated or made worse the organizational experience for another group? Often time, we do things with the best of intentions that have horrible side effects. Just read about the feelings of the scientists when the results of the atomic bomb showed true human horror in the goal of “protecting the USA”.

It’s immediately alleviating the people involved in the problem of the responsibility of taking ownership of the issue. It is not encouraging them to creatively work through the issue together with the people directly involved and foster candid conversation to solve actual problems (as they will appear again). It is truly taking away the expertise that you as a leader hired in the people doing the work and saying “apparently I cannot trust I hired the right people who can solve problems to support and overall goal of the company, so I will solve it”. (see my previous blog of problem solvers versus solution enablers).

It’s a missed coaching moment to help make your company stronger by encouraging people to work together in diverse, coupled or interdependent groups to work through and issue and embrace an experimental mindset to solve the problem (as you have to be comfortable that failure is an option and remove as much fear and doubt as possible by encouraging this approach).

The worst thing I see here is that you are establishing the idea that if something is broke, an edict will fix it. If I am trying to get a round peg into a square hole, I can easily solve by mandating all holes be round. But what happens when I get a cubed piece? Isn’t it better, just like we do with kids, to encourage the examination of the shape in comparison with the potential holes and try another one?

Before folks get too worked up, I am not “anti-policy”. We all have rules to follow, compliance guidelines we meet for human rights, laws that may govern us (that sometimes we may not agree with), general company policies we have to follow and even those things that dictate the way we work. That is a given.

But, what I am getting at here is that the implementation of a process should be value-driven and not reactionary to a problem. You cannot script people into following something with blind compliance. Some will follow any rule. However, others will question it, fight it or do everything just to subvert it as it does not address the actual underlying issue.

For instance, some of you subverted the rule of the speed limit so you could settle in today and read this blog. But maybe I am a bit delusional myself there. 😉

So as a leader, before you “solve the on the surface problem” by issuing an edict or wrapping something inside a process, do one thing. Listen.

Quiet the inner voice of your own that is screaming “we’re not going to make the production date, I am going to get screamed at or fired” and hear what the issue really is. Ask questions for clarity and help coach someone towards examing their thoughts for resolution.

Encourage those close candid relationships between the area of disjunction and even help guide them through examining the actual problem together.

Foster the idea that the goal of doing this is to create a plan of action to attempt to resolve it but encourage a culture that understands that failure is always an option. Teach people to say “I was wrong” and use information to reframe and try another solution in an effort to our find a solution.

Instill in people that solutions are often fleeting and have to be examined and nurtured and often changed over time as they become ineffective. Don’t instill the idea in your organization that solutions are chiseled in stone but more often written in pencil to be changed again later.

Ensure that before you fire open the word processor or pick up that pen, the process you intend to release actually holds real value and allows for sustainability, not a knee jerk reaction from fear or frustration.

Processes, like gaining weight, are often easy to indulge in and can create bloat and damage to organizational health even with good intentions or to make the situation better. And just like losing weight, they can be twice as hard to change once established and you may not fully know the effects of the damage you have done to the body as a whole until the weight comes off.

Typically I start my posts with a quote but I just couldn’t that one that inspired me to start my post with. But then, it showed up. I have been reading Creativity, Inc. lately about Ed Catmull and the story of Pixar and one statement struck me (as I recently posted a recommend on this book) …

I really like this. I live by the idea me and I accept not being the smartest guy in the room (as it is truly difficult to stay versed deeply in technology and sharpen the leadership skills). But what I also believe is that if I build the right team and help them unleash their creativity, and make failure a concept separated from fear that I be a part of helping to find the best solutions.

This got me to really thinking on a dilemma that I think a lot of leaders face, are they “problem solvers” or “solution enablers”? What I mean by this is do they always seek to provide the answer or do they work to create a culture in which people collaborate and are openly candid to allow folks to “find the best solution or focus their own inspiration”? I think the latter is much more valuable to an organization.

Now, I get the allure of being the “goto guy” where you are the clutch player that people turn to in the last minutes of a tight game. It creates an increased sense of self worth, makes you feel like you are driving something for the business and being a real team player. Now what often happens to folks like this is they get promoted to manage others based on their successful track record and instead of making that mental shift to the responsibility of being a leader, they retain the idea of being that “goto guy” as part of their management style.

Now before folks get too worked up over this statement, let me be clear; becoming a managerial level leader isn’t a place that a person goes to die (although some may disagree) but it does possess its own set of skills, needs and challenges that can often be a far departure than that of being in a technical role (which has its own sets of skill, needs and challenges as well). What I mean though is that often I see really sharp technical people who become leaders and never seem to realize that their role has changed. They spend a whole lot of time fighting all the things they dislike about the new role and try to cling to what they did before as much as possible. They become closet coders, weekend code warriors, first lines of defense and so on. Although they are put in a position to lead others based on their past performance and grow more folks like them, it’s a struggle to not be that person that got them there.

Trust me, I personally anguished the death of a former role for some time when I moved into a group leader role and struggled really hard to try and figure out how to be both. What I found is someone has to be committed in either role and until I decided to do that, I would be ineffective at both. So, I said my goodbyes to that role and vowed to stay current in concepts surrounding it (should I care to return to that role) and realized someone always had to do the things that needed to be done that I as a technical person avoided like a vampire and sunlight.

So let’s get out of the ditches and back on the road here.

Being a Problem Solver

So the tendency of a person who has not truly embraced a new leadership role may be to continue to provide solutions when faced with a problem. Or maybe it was explicitly expressed to them that this is why they are being asked to assume this role. There is nothing wrong with that, I mean who wants problems to fester with no solutions?

But where is the long term benefit to the organization and by doing this are you possibly creating a culture “waiting to be told what to do”? How are they helping to grow problem solving as part of the bedrock of their culture?

Being a Solution Enabler

I have always liked this idea. I remember the first time I experienced a manager who believed that this approach was necessary, or possibly even fundamental, to my professional growth.

When I encountered an obstacle she would, instead of giving me “the” answer, help me explore my assumptions, state my obstacle clearly so I understood what the problem truly was and turn it over with me while giving me candid feedback (positive and negative) as I worked through it towards the solution.

At the time, I sometimes thought; “this woman is really a smart with a wealth of experience in this field, why does she not just tell me how to overcome this so I can move on and get this thing done”?

But after we performed this activity a few times, I saw something slowly change in me. I began doing the same exercise for myself and in her absence. I reached out to smart colleagues I worked with and collaborated with them to work through the obstacles and we started collaborating more together just like this. That’s when it hit me and actually had an impact on me, she was trying to grow a culture of people who solved the problems and not one that came to her as the smartest person in the room for the answer everytime. She knew she would not be there forever with this company and I believe she felt that the best thing she could do for it was to create a problem solving culture.

There was no doubt in each situation I brought to her, that given her experience she could have just figured it out for me and just popped out a course of action. We actually talked about this later in life and she expressed that sometimes it was hard for her to stay true to encouraging me through this process when she saw me knocking on the door of a solution only to turn away and doubt my own idea. But she said she knew that this was the right thing to do.

But what she knew then, and that I learned more completely much later in my career, was that by creating a larger benefit to the organization and to my personal growth was to let me struggle, let me fail if necessary, begin teaching me to accept candid feedback without immediately becoming defensive when it was critical and helping me become a problem solver that saw the benefit of collaboration.

While I learned some of these lessons while working there, several came much later through professional maturity, humility and observation of seeing problem solvers, not solution enablers.

But as I read Ed Catmull’s similar transition in defining the identity of Pixar following their initial success with Toy Story, he indicated a similar approach as he made a clear ead distinction between the concepts of candor and honesty. But the underlying idea was that through his creation of a group inside Pixar called “the braintrust” was to encourage candor within the company as a part of the cultural fabric by providing feedback and helping directors, screenwriters and animators to stay true to “telling a good story” as a core value of Pixar. Through approaching it this way, he removed use of the idea of “being honest and the moral stigma attached inherently to a concept of honesty (in which being dishonest is a bad thing) to one of being candid, which does not carry such a moral connotation as we do not vilify someone for their candor in the same regard.

I really liked that this intentional semantic consideration helped begin creating openness in which feedback early and often was seen as a good thing and that the idea of being stuck was not necessarily bad either.

So, take a deep breath, step back and be candid with yourself. Are you a “problem solver” or a “solution enabler”? Do you toss out solutions without asking anyone to explore the problem with you?

Or, are you growing a culture of people who are unafraid to seek feedback (and providing consistent opportunities to do so) and whose culture accepts candid feedback, good or bad, as a part of assistance in the creative process?

I personally want to realize the value that my former manager instilled in me and help people process and solve their own problems through collaboration and feedback. Do I have a long ways to go, maybe so. But I am surrounded by people who continually grow so it encourages me to grow as well.

Been catching up from a small amount of time off and had not gotten a solid idea for my next post. I have been spending my time reading a book that is very inspiring and wanted to share. Creativity, Inc.

This is a book by Ed Catmull, the president of animation at Pixar. It contains some history of the company and how they came to be including some of Catmull’s own beginnings to see animation be done through computer form (and outlines a lot of advances that he made himself to that process before Pixar).

But more important than this it explores two core ideas:

What does a leader do when they reach the pinnacle of the initial thing they set out to do? We all know this can often take the wind out of our sails and we begin to feel lost once we feel we reached a crescendo. He openly explores that following the success of the first Toy Story movie.

He discusses how the Pixar culture was created with intention and why they do things the way they do and explores many obstacles that anyone in any creative capacity face.

This book definitely uses creative domains as the basis of its ideas but once you begin to dig into the portions where ideas are explored past the history, you can see many themes that could be applied in any organization, creative or not. Just makes sense that the author would draw examples from direct experience in the animation industry. But he does a wonderful job of turning these ideas over so they can inspire thinking of what aspects could be used in any organization or subjects that allow you to reflect on how your organization works today.

I am almost finished with the book and have balanced it between the audio version and the paperback itself. Usually listening when I am driving or need some thinking space and referencing the paperback to reinforce some ideas that significantly catch my interest. I will say that my paperback may be a bit dog-eared by the end as there is so many thought provoking ideas and lessons learned throughout this work.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is leading an organization and consciously thinking of how to create a culture as a driving factor.

I have several posts in various states in the hopper, trying to get back to a regular flow of ideas but just taking some time to invest in my own thinking!